hermit's thatch

The great dilemma for dwellers of small or tiny houses is what to do with books. (Here, of course, we are not referring to electronic formats, which are sometimes a reluctant necessity; enlarging fonts for old eyes is a boon, but reading them is an aseptic experience without spatial-temporal marker, aesthetically and tactically empty, a kind of defeat.)

One rule of some simplicity advocates is that for every new book, an existing one must go. This is a hard rule when one’s collection is already considered essential, and especially after experiencing regret over a favorite or needed book long discarded. Nor does “discarding” seem a harsh word for this mechanical treadmill or quota system. Besides, who can say that what was good won’t become essential, that what was redundant and disposable becomes a much needed and now lacking insight or contained an important point overlooked or underappreciated at the time. It can be argued that giving books to a library is a good and charitable use, but having spent a career in libraries it must be said that few donations are deemed useful by the powers that judge. Let us admit, too, that a book sale or even an arrangement like Book Crossing is poor treatment of a treasured tome that is being booted from the collection based on draconian numbers. Seems as heartless as abandoning a puppy, or worse.

Ancient Chinese poet-recluses have all mentioned the limits of their book collections, sometimes rather few books at that. We only hear of Tao Chien’s books when he sits at night to browse the “Classic of Mountains and Seas” (Shan hai jing), probably his only book. Han-shan, recently reclused from court service, tells us of daily life, that

with his son he picks wild fruit
with his wife he hoes between rocks
what does he have at home
a shelf full of nothing but books.

But that was before he became a hermit, some sources suggesting that poverty and starvation killed his family.

Po Chu-i built a two-room house for his wife, daughter, and his own anticipated retirement from court. He describes the cottage in loving detail, mentioning dimensions, windows, bamboo and hemp, beams and rafters, wooden benches, two screen partitions, favorite objects: a ch’in, or lute– and books, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist.

Stonehouse built a tiny house or hut about ten feet wide. From the outside the hut looks cramped, he admits, but he does not mind because he owns so little: a grass mattress, a slab of wood for a pillow, a gilt statue of the Buddha (and three clay ones fashioned by his own hand). Stonehouse tells us that at night he moves a “book stand to read sutras by moonlight,” but doesn’t mention any other books.

The Japanese hermit Kamo no-Chomei described his hut in detail, including his images of the Buddha. He tells us that “on the wall that faces the north I have built a little shelf on which I keep three or four black leather baskets that contain books of poetry and music and extracts from the sacred writings. Beside them stand a folding koto and lute.”

The eccentric Japanese recluse-monk Kenko, whose “Essays in Idleness” reflects a somewhat Epicurean angle to solitary living, notes (not unlike Tao Chien), that “The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.” Among his preferred reading, Kenko includes Po Chu-i and the Taoist classics of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu.

Lastly, for now, is the Japanese poet-hermit-monk Ryokan.

Ryokan describes his hut in one poem as a “three-mat hut,” but in another passage as “four-mat.” He refers to the same hut, of course, not necessarily to the number of tatami mats as flooring but to the relative size of his “little grass hut,” what he sees as “little more than four bare walls.” He mentions his one window. There is no apparent niche or divider; Ryokan speaks of “sitting along in my empty room.” On a wall several poems are written. On the bed and strewn on the floor are books of poetry. His possessions include one robe (probably two sewn as one but thin nevertheless), and a walking stick. He employed a “solitary lamp” and a hearth that burned firewood or charcoal. Ryokan mentions a kettle and a rice steamer, plus his ubiquitous bowl.

Skipping a few centuries we come to Michel de Montaigne, the French Renaissance writer of “Essays,” including a favorite titled “On Solitude.” He tells us he had plenty of room for books (being also a lawyer and civil servant) but took a different tact. He disagrees with Pliny’s advice to use solitude to devote oneself to study, for even books and learning, says Montaigne, are a tyranny. “Books are pleasant; but if by associating with them we end by losing gaiety and health, the best parts of us, let us leave them.” Further, “I like only pleasant and easy books which entertain me,” he declares, “or those that console me and counsel me to regulate my life and my death.”

Montaigne does not contradict the Chinese or Japanese hermits. Everyone values books, and if more are helpful, why not keep them, wherever in the house or hut one must find a place for them. Whenever one comes across a used book in a shop or library that is quite valuable, the surprise and delight of discovery is always refreshing. But, more glumly, its owner may have parted reluctantly with the book, or not understood it, or was forced by wrong-headed advocates of simplicity. Or perhaps its owner is no longer with us. Long life to that one who has passed, to one who loved good books as much as we do.

In an article by Raymond D. Havens titled “Solitude and the Neoclassicists,” reviewed in Hermitary, the author notes that the dry rationalist British writers of the 18th century had a deep loathing of solitude and anything or anyone interested or attracted to solitude. The author traces the attitude to anti-clericalism (solitude being identified with monks), Enlightenment enthusiasm, and a disdain for religious thought. They narrowly defined solitude as retirement at best, sloth and dissipation at worst, and held a deep aversion to being alone.

For British attitudes more sympathetic to solitude, therefore, one must turn to the eras just before and just after the 18th century. Thus the poet Alexander Pope composed “Ode to Solitude” in 1700, just before the rationalist era took hold, and John Keats composed “O, Solitude!” in 1816. Interestingly, while we may think that reflections on solitude are the provenance of age and maturity, Pope composed his poem at 12 years of age, and Keats when he was 21. For both poets, the poems were their first effort. Pope understands the nature of solitude as withdrawal and anonymity. Keats, a sociable and gregarious youth, saw solitude perfected by sharing it with a like-minded companion.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
“Ode to Solitude”

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
______________________________________________

John Keats (1795-1821)
“O Solitude!”

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,-—
Nature’s observatory whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refined,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

In every major world religion, the emergence of eremitism or a more restrained form of solitude practice emerges at a very specific historical point in the evolution of the given religion. One may even consider such a moment a precondition to the emergence of eremitism or an equivalent practice of solitude. The question of what can sustain eremitism over time will be found within the moment itself.

And if “religion” is broadly defined as a way of looking at the universe and responding to large questions, then the historical model might be broadened to include primitive religion as well as philosophy itself. The important factor is the larger context of society and culture.

Consider Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. All of these are “scriptural” religions, to some decree, meaning that the religion presents a set of texts as authoritative. At the same time, each of these religions emerges from specific historical, cultural, social, geographic, environmental, material,and perhaps psychological, contexts. These avenues of reflection and investigation are rich, indeed. For now, here are very brief considerations of each:

Hinduism emerged from the the distinctive myths, deities, stories, rituals, prayers, and societal practices of the conquering Aryans in India. The myriad gods, their foibles and desires expressed in stories, and the social hierarchy or caste system they created around priests, warriors, mercantile, and household classes, comprise the structure in which the religious injunctions were pursued. The scripture is the Rig Veda, which has no spirituality, because the society and dominant Brahmin class had no need for it. But as that intellectual class came to recognize the shallowness of rote rites, prayers, and inadequate comprehension of self and universe, succeeding generations of Brahmins compose the Upanishads, spiritualizing the religion and forming Vedanta. In this new, refreshing spiritual movement emerges the primacy of the hermit, as a social and religious option.

Judaism reflects its desert origin in a sky god, unusual as a single deity, thus monotheism, which may have had Egyptian origins or simply reflect the stark geography of its earliest adherents. Its priests and scholars accommodated myth and history with ritual and doctrine in its scripture, dominated by the harsh image of the deity Yahweh, shaping the psychology of the Hebrew and Jewish culture. Rigidly communal in social expectations, structuring society around the family and community, the exhaustion of the old scripture after the diaspora gradually saw emergence of mysticism, especially in medieval Western Europe and later in Eastern Europe. In these mystical forays, the practice of solitude and tolerance of scholarly eccentricity in pursuit of spirituality became options to the serious adherent. Though no formal eremitism emerged in the Judaic tradition, instances of solitary behavior were tolerated.

The content of earliest Christianity remained the experience of the first generation or two witnessing the historical Jesus, for Jewish scripture retained a moral and priestly hold for a century and more. Christianity became split between adherents of the historical sense of community and values versus the emergent priestly and ecclesiastical structure that regularized (or “sanitized”) the sayings and teachings into ritual, doctrine, and dogma. As the latter forces dominated, the first wave of hermits emerged in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, lasting several hundred years and strongly reflecting a spiritual versus ecclesiastical preference. Eventually scattered geographically from their desert settings, eremitism consolidated in Greece, Ethiopia, and parts of Europe. But in Europe the ecclesiastical movement dominated (less so in Britain, southern Italy, and later, in the Low Counties). Eremitism only reached its apex in Europe with the emergence of a significant mystical movement in the later Middle Ages. Christian eremitism virtually disappeared after the Protestant reform and emergence of nation-states.

Islam shares many characteristics of Judaism, not only as an Abrahamic religion and its conception of God, but in terms of initial geography and the dominance of communalism, discouraging social life outside of family and group. A rapid 7th-century expansion from Persia to Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, could not contain a strict ritualism from welcome intellectual influences. A spirituality built around mysticism evolved into Sufism, with its emphasis on solitude as an individual practice towards greater comprehension and identification with God. As with Judaism, no hermit movement emerged, but the primacy of solitude in spirituality, however restricted or rarefied, is a notable feature.

Buddhism represented a new religious phenomenon among world religions. For centuries, the compelling moral weight of traditional ascription of sayings and teachings of historical Guatama were sufficient to guide the adherent. The religion remained largely the practice of a spiritual “elite,” leaving myth, ritual, and doctrine to the mass of societal adherents, the tenor of which was governed largely by the particular society or country. Unlike Brahmins, the Buddhist monks seldom interacted with society except on a “shamanic” basis, as in bestowing wishes, prayers, and healing formulas, especially in Tibet, where the transition from the local Bon religion sustained these rituals. Eremitism seemed inevitable in Buddhism, especially among an intellectual class not residing in large ecclesiastical structures like monasteries but pursuing Buddhism as philosophy, with a willingness to follow some ritual prescriptions as religion. The rich reflections of the historical hermits of China and Japan automatically include an entirely spiritual component, something between philosophy and poetry, weaving an eremitic movement that often absorbs the entire expression of Buddhism.

In each instance above, though sketchily presented, an inevitable conclusion emerges: eremitism thrives when ecclesiastical structure is weak or absent, when a mystical or spiritual sense of the universe is evoked, pursued, and applied and appreciated, when rote ritual and doctrine is exhausted, and when the social structure itself is challenged by the popular realization that conventional thought and formulas are insufficient to represent the heights to which the given religion can attain.

Minimalism and simplicity are often and erroneously made to be synonymous. Minimalism is a style of art and aesthetics, while simplicity refers to a style of life or of being, although it can refer to a style of doing things. It may seem that our life-style should be a form of art, and that therefore one can conflate the two terms. However, minimalism attempts to identify what can be quantitatively removed with the increasingly better results, as in a work of art or music. Colors, objects or musical notes are removed in order to achieve an effect constructing the work with fewer parts or pieces, with fewer notes or shades, but creating a new and different effect. In painting, a canvas with one color is presented. But the intent is not simple. The intent is to absorb the multiplicity of reality into a particular mood of sudden expectation, of sudden realization. In music, minimalism often repeats a series in order to achieve an effect that, as with art, is absorbing the whole of reality at the moment, and brings the listener to a poignant mood. This achievement of mood is the whole purpose of any piece of music, but in minimalism the effect is specific: emotional, poignant, evanscent.

In simplicity, life is streamlined of complexity as to convey plainness, normalcy, and regularity, an approachability based on clarity. Simplicity can be material clarity, reduction without loss of function, plainness in its deliberate elimination of color, nuance, hue, or time lapse. But simpllicity does not evoke emotion, rather drains it, neutralizes it, eliminates it as subjective. Simplicity is not the minimalizing of complexity but the return to original state, to what was sufficient at one time and can be restored to that state, appreciated as it was. Simplicity calls for a lack of judgment, opinion, or subjective imposition. Minimalism still wants you to go somewhere, while simplicity is self-sufficient and exists without you.

No better reference to a clarifying tradition in regard to minimalism and simplicity is to be found as in wabi-sabi. Here the emotional content of solitude and impermanence penetrate the assumption of control, artistic or otherwise, and the notion of imperfection (in nature and in the human product) undermine any goal of self-sufficiency. Thus, our minimalism must be precise in conveying emotion, yet it will be contrived if removed too far from nature itself and from the patterns we observe in nature, which include simplicity.

Religion and spirituality are seen as synonymous in belonging to a pool of thinking about social and historical events and phenomena. But spirituality has never been a necessary component of religion, and is often at odds with the anthropological and cultural function of religion.

Nowadays, people who are religious belong to particular sects, while those who still miss an other-worldliness derived from religion, construct an idealized, somewhat sanitized, version of religion that is called “spirituality.” As Western religious sects declined in influence during the twentieth century, spirituality as an alternative emerged. Usually spirituality was pursued by those encountering Eastern thought and realizing the primitive lack of depth in their own Western tradition. Theosophists and New Thought adherents had begun this process long ago, with a curiosity about India and Tibet, and twentieth-century successors rediscovered China and Japan. Spirituality assigned to Eastern thought allowed a new perspective for Westerners that their old religions had never pursued, with their anthropological emphasis on ritual and rote belief. Eastern thought promised a spiritual dimension accessible without ritual or weekly tithes. Undoubtedly, Western religions stopped growing (qualitatively) when their secular counterparts, the nation-states of the West, collapsed into internecine civil wars (dating from turbulent late medieval times) on to the international wars (the destructive World Wars). But more fundamentally, Western religions exhausted their theology, after which spiritualized forms of mysticism emerged. Mysticism blurred the hard definitions, dogmas, and categories so favored by ecclesiastical authorities, so that the reaction to mysticism further desiccated the religions. No wonder that today’s expression “I’m not religious but I’m spiritual” or a version of it rings inevitable but also a bit vacuous. One wants to be more specific about truth.

Meditation and relaxation are not dictionary synonyms, but given the restless mood of modern society, the desire for tranquility equates methods of relaxation with the credentials of meditation. But relaxation is the temporary suspension of the effects of traumatically ruthless society and culture, and bound to expire as soon as the individual is plunged back into the modern world. Relaxtion is sold by business interests specifically as the remedy for coping, but it was never the remedy for coping with harsh materialism, but rather for dropping out of it to discover and pursue the temporary pleasures. In this process, popular media legitimizes a particular socio-economic status and its conditions, endorses an existing relationship to money, labor in a modern technological world, and the acceptance of the materialization of culture.

Hermit and recluse are old favorite terms of juxtaposition often made synonymous by dictionaries. Strictly speaking, with a few technical exceptions, a recluse has a psychological fear of people, whereas the hermit does not. The so-called “North Pond” hermit of Maine is a classic recluse who dared not encounter people, though his fear of them was because he stole from them. What hermit would steal from anyone! Perhaps his reclusion was strategic, but it certainly made for mental stagnation and dependence, certainly not eremitism. Yet the popular media continues to call him a “hermit.” Juxtapose Po Chu-i or Ryokan, true hermits, who expressed the sentiment: “It’s not that I don’t like people, it’s just that I am so very tired of them.”

The previous entry noted that Western Christian theologians conclude that the image and likeness of God refers ultimately to immortality, the only factor that the resurrection of Christ assures for humanity. While the image of God in humans may seem to refer to virtue and morality, theologians from Augustine to Aquinas cling to definitions, logic, and the overarching divine economy as a system not permitting them to make far-reaching conclusions.

But why cannot the divine image “trickle down” a moral image in humans? Instead, humans must be assigned morality through commandments, systems of punishment for sin, for, indeed, they cannot share foreknowledge, the power of creation, or other characteristics of God. The Jewish scriptural writers never assumed that this image and likeness, derived from Genesis, is more than consciousness and will, and never assumed immortality. The ecclesiastical Christian writers, however, go so far as to embrace the primacy of immortality because the economy of salvation passes through the passion and resurrection of the second person of the Trinity, himself divine enough to merit what no human being could.

Thus the historical Jesus of morality and virtue is necessarily displaced by the needs of Western theology, for the teachings of Jesus are not sufficient to guarantee an other-worldly preoccupation that would transcend the Jewish social and spiritual communitarianism of its culture. Christianity could not become a world or universal culture with a mere moral code or set of rituals. The ecclesiastical apologists must necessarily construct a divine counterpart of empire. Ancient history showed that every empire from Babylon to Rome inevitably divinized its project in order to sustain itself. No less did the Christianized empire after Constantine.

A favorite crystallization of these two competing visions of Christianity (and, therefore, of the image of God) is presented by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his masterful novel The Brothers Karamazov. Here are presented two world views in Ivan, the atheist intellectual, and in Zosima, the simple and affective monk.

Ivan presents the idea of the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, satisfied with a recent auto de fe, where heretics have been burned at the stake under his supervision. The inquisitor happens to walk past a church where a stranger to the city has gathered a crowd witnessing a miracle, the revival of a dead girl returned to her joyful parents, to the awe of bystanders. But the inquisitor is furious and has the stranger arrested and thrown into a dungeon, where he is visited that night by the inquisitor. The old man rails against the stranger, who remains silent the whole time. The old man suspects who the stranger is, wants to know why he has returned to challenge the church. For 1500 years, he avers, the church has been working to subordinate the people’s will to obedience, to dogma, to rules and restrictions and an economy of other-worldliness, fed by teachings and punishments. Clearly the inquisitor has no faith or beliefs — he only relishes the power that the ecclesiastical authorities have crafted these many years. And now he is furious that the true nature of Jesus’ teachings may get about, as what he will have to label heresy, through the mouth of the returned one himself. He vows to burn the stranger at the stake tomorrow morning.

In contrast, the monk Zosima, presented by Karamazov brother Aloysa, adheres completely to the love that is the core of Jesus’ teaching and through which all belief or ideas are engendered and held (rather than the other way around). To Zosima, prayer restores simplicity and identifies with God, the image of which is greatly mollified from the Yahweh of the Old Testament but also from the Yahweh of the New Testament taught in the West. Prayer is in the orthodox formula of seeking mercy for all, empathy for all, identification with all. This identification engenders love for all. As the character relates to his fellow-monks:

Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love. Love the animals: God gave them the rudiments of thought and an untroubled joy. Do not trouble it, do not torment them, do not take their joy from them, do not go against God’s purpose. …

One may stand perplexed before some thought, especially men’s sin, asking oneself: “Shall I take it by force, or by humble love?” Always resolve to take it by humble love. If you so resolve once and for all, you will be able to overcome the world. A loving humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all, nothing compares with it. Keep company with yourself and look to yourself every day and hour, every minute, that your image ever be gracious. …

My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world. Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious tha you are now, if only by a drop, still it would be easier. All is like an ocean, I say to you. Tormented by universal love, you, too, would then start praying to the birds, as if in a sort of ecstasy, and entreat them to forgive you your sin. Cherish this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to people.

Zosima continues, but one can perceive here the direction of the higher religion, of the historical Jesus, reminiscent of Eastern thought, and referring to the mystical theology of both the earlier orthodox fathers and of Westerners like Meister Eckhart. For the mass of humanity not inclined to mysticism, Zosima has nevertheless outlined the correct religion: the religion of love, mutual empathy, and the development of a new culture based on the primacy of this teaching. All this is quite the opposite of the Inquisitor’s religion and view of culture. A successful pursuit of the image of God must surely reside in the intimations of Zosima.

In his Book of Disquiet, the eccentric Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa notes the horror that must have come upon the 19th century to realize the full meaning of the phrase “made in the image and likeness of God,” referring to human beings.

Why horror? The original Christian sense of the phrase referred to the existence of the soul and the essential concomitant characteristic of the soul: immortality. The literal interpretation of image and likeness suggesting consciousness, will, forethought, and agency, the sharing of the virtues of God, were concepts for theological specialists, and quickly yielded to popular sentiment as mere immortality.

Immortality came to dominate morality as a religious criterion because a divine economy must have a perpetual or inviolable integrity over the centuries and millennia, to assure that the principles of morality (if not belief) must be perpetuated, must parallel the immortality that theologians made absolute. Morality was subject to interpretation, but immortality was absolute and fixed, presumably in the mind of God.

The Hebrews and Jews of the Old Testament did not develop the concept of the soul or immortality, and saw the human likeness to God as the infusion of a pneuma or breath, a personality or expression, distinct from other beings, itself setting up the problematic image of Yahweh, often arbitrary, authoritarian, and vindictive, as the previous entries on Jung and Kierkegaard have shown.

Thus Jonathan Edwards, the American Calvinist preacher, in the middle of the 18th century:

O Sinner! Consider the fearful Danger you are in: ‘Tis a great Furnace of Wrath, a wide and bottomless Pit, full of the Fire of Wrath, that you are held over in the Hand of that God, whose Wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the Damned in Hell: You hang by a slender Thread, with the Flames of divine Wrath flashing about it, and ready every Moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no Interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the Flames of Wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one Moment.

What matter the other likenesses to the divine when immortality alone remains after death? Who in not, in Edwards estimation, not a sinner? What trifling device of confession and rebirth does he propose outside of authority, God’s or his? What is left to the individual soul except the consciousness of a thread, a hairline’s distance between God’s arbitrariness and the self, forever unannihilated?

With enlightenment, science, and (in the popular culture) secularism throughout the 19th century, the notion of immortality necessarily took on a more social context. The afterlife had been understood to be an abstract state, but how could it be understood as but an extension of present existence in its social and cultural context — not simply religious context as preachers like Edwards maintained, but even revolutionary or utopian thinking. The previous idyllic state of similar-minded villagers or aristocrats inhabiting heaven must give way as the masses, however pious, fell deeper into the evils of daily industrial life and therefore conceived of the blessings of heaven as more a contrast to the evils of quotidian life. Immortality as analgesic would have less attraction in popular circles, with the effect that defining afterlife would become more difficult and challenging, leading to silence on the subject outside of narrow religious circles. By the early 20th century, Pessoa could see that issue as more horrible to contemplate and work out than to ignore.

Many observers have seen image and likeness, and presumably immortality, as misleading paths for popular religion, bypassing a socially engaged alternative for a traditional one that safely conforms to silence about the morality of authorities and powers. Consequently, too, the issue of describing the afterlife distracts from the spiritual, numinous and mystical that transcends the universality of immortality, with the potential for redefining consciousness and afterlife. But the mingling and distilling that can be pursued now is difficult, time-consuming, and complex.

The desire for immortality is a vague human inkling but the burden of consciousness, an intimation but also a great arrogance. The desire for immortality may arise not from individuals but from societies and groups with specific goals or devices realized by the promotion of immortality to masses of popular and humble people. The solitary looking within sees what is available to self, what is capable in self-knowledge, what can be demanded by the self. The solitary leaves to the elements what may be the answer, or the framework of a speculation. The Buddha was right to refuse metaphysical speculation, and we can find the same sentiment not so difficult to appreciate, as expressed in the same 18th century of Jonathan Edwards, by the 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope’s “Ode to Solitude”:

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix’d; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

The previous post presented Kierkegaard’s discovery (1844) of the ethical contradictions in the biblical Abraham — and, by extension, Yahweh, though Kierkegaard does not develop this latter dimension. Just a little over a century later (1952), Jung pursued the similar issue in the biblical Job, a story or myth composed to ostensibly show, like the story of Abraham, the resilient faith of a suffering servant of Yahweh and an assertion of the ethics and faith to be exercised by that servant. But Jung’s brilliant tour de force psychoanalyzes Yahweh and reveals the nature of the god and faith that Kierkegaard had already struggled with in fear and trembling.

The chief dilemma Jung’s Answer to Job addresses is the psychology of Yahweh; the second part deals with the psychological significance of Christ and the New Testament up to the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse.

Biblical texts, notes Jung, have consistently presented “a contradictory picture of Yahweh —

the picture of a God who knew no moderation in his emotions and suffered precisely from this lack of moderation. He himself admitted that he was eaten with rage and jealousy and that this knowledge was painful to him. Insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along with cruelty, creative power along with destructiveness. Everything was there, and none of these qualities was an obstacle to the other.

Concludes Jung:

Such a condition is only conceivable either when no reflecting consciousness is present at all, or when the capacity for reflection is very feeble and a more or less adventitious phenomenon. A condition of this sort can only be described as amoral. [emphasis Jung]

The story of Job is not unfamiliar. He loses his livelihood, his property, animals, servants, his family, his physical health. He is reduced to disease and dust, scratching horrible sores and wasting away. His trust in Yahweh is expected to be unshaken, as his friends insist, saying that Job must suffer due to bad faith or a secret sin, which Job denies, holding fast to his righteousness and guiltlessness. Job argues his case, telling Yahweh that his innocence is surely known by the Omniscient, that Job holds firm to a trust in divine justice.

But the situation is worsened by two factors: first, that Yahweh lacks self-reflection and is apparently unconscious of his own past acts, that having lied to David Yahweh may well now persist in his tormenting, as Job surely knows, and secondly, that Job (or the story’s author) realizes the scandalous fact that God consults and wagers with Satan.

Jung identifies Yahweh’s unconscious resentment against Job: that Job may well know what Yahweh is all about, that Job has seen the fickleness and arbitrariness, and that he deliberately mollifies God with contrite and self-abasing words. But Yahweh is not finished. He accuses Job of justifying himself, he who has no arm like God, no voice like God, that the proud and the wicked will be brought low. Only then, says Yahweh, will he acknowledge Job.

“Job is challenged as though he himself were a god,” notes Jung. But Job’s soothing speech finally has its affect: “The therapeutic measure of unresisting acceptance had proved its value yet again.”

Hereafter, Jewish authors recalled Sophia, the forgotten feminine aspect of God. The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon reestablishes her influence, introduces new vocabulary, and shifts Yahweh to repentance and the notion of making up for past behavior anticipating its reversal through a divine son made human. The prophets, such as Ezekiel and Daniel, begin to suggest such a messianic balance, especially the Book of Enoch. One may note the messianic allusions in Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jung offers a review of gnostic and psychological explanations merged with orthodox logic to culminate in the clearly deified vessel into which Yahweh’s son will be poured. The difficult doctrine of God as Summum Bonum, especially in light of centuries of history dealing with Yahweh, means that Christ will have the burden of reconciling many contradictions.

The historical Jesus is a reticent personality, teaching an inward spiritual practice out of the limelight of doctrine, ritual, institutions, and pubic expression, closer to an Eastern tradition. In Enoch, the “son of man” is always associated with a justice and righteousness wholly uncompromising with the past behavior of Yahweh, a steadfast ethics that will reassert the divine in humans, with the gradual withdrawal of Yahweh. The promise of a Paraclete, a Holy Spirit, to succeed Christ is intended to allay the fear of Yahweh, and to strengthen the trust that love, not fear, has triumphed.

But the work of Jesus as Christ is overturned and undone with the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, which usurps the Christ of the Gospels for a surrogate of Yahweh. A clue may have been in the fact that Jesus never eliminated Satan, shown in the Gospels in temptations, possessions, and betrayals. But the more telling clue is when Jesus cries out on the cross to the Father, to Yahweh, who has forsaken him. To be forsaken is taken by some dogmatic observers as a human response to a necessary mission of redemption. But the cry shatters the notion of a hypostatic union of human and divine. Instead the presumed divine nature of Christ sympathizes with suffering, not cosmic theological economy, and experiences the insight of cruelty and suffering in bloody sacrifice, as primitive as anything in the Old Testament. The cry on the cross is a fundamental statement that the omniscient and all-powerful must still resort to this willful device as appeasement.

From the cross the logical path goes directly to the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse, where the Christ of the Gospels is transformed into a violent son of Yahweh, merging with the Ancient of Days. “We no longer recognize the meek Lamb who lets himself be led unresistingly to the slaughter; there is only the aggressive and irascible ram whose rage can at last be vented,” notes Jung.

A veritable orgy of hatred, wrath, vindictiveness, and bland destructive fury that revels in fantastic images of terror breaks out and with blood and fire overwhelms a world which Christ had just endeavored to restore to the original state of innocence and loving communion with God.

Christ now weilds a sickle to wage holy war, and presses the wine press containing enemies, not grapes, yielding blood not wine. The final war only temporarily locks up Satan, and “that woman Jezebel,” the Whore of Babylon, psychological counterpart of feminine Sophia, is slaughtered. The book foresees the reign of Christ until Satan is released and the Antichrist consumes the world.

Christianity has largely ignored the Book of Revelation, not explaining how such a return to the Shadow of Yahweh could be countenanced after the Gospels. Early Christianity labor under its psychology, constructing a religion of psychological beseigement. Clearly a psychological response that retains the shadow, this dark side, continued throughout Christian history and still holds sway regardless of the canonical status of the book.

Jung concludes his essay remarking that the logic of the Christian myth demands that God yet become human, or indeed that the human yet become the divine, an active responsibility for contemporaries given the state of the world today. Jung adds remarks on the timely Catholic dogma of Mary’s assumption (addenda notes from 1956), seen in the context of restlessness and fear engendered by the threat of nuclear annihilation, a threat resulting from cultures and institutions ignoring the essential archetypal role of the feminine in psychology and culture, and rejecting the universal message of the historical Jesus.

The fate of Western culture is anticipated in the 19th century not by Nietzsche but by his predecessor Kierkegaard, who, like Nietzsche, places this fate squarely upon the perception of religious belief and behavior.

In “Attack upon Christendom” (1854-55), Kierkegaard wonders how an entire country like Denmark, indeed, the entire Western world, can profess itself to be guided by the message of the Gospel and New Testament, how it can claim to be a Christian culture. He refers to the dictum that the way is through the narrow gate and that the way to destruction is wide.

Now, on the contrary, to speak only of Denmark, we are all Christians, the way is as broad as it possibly can be, the broadest in Denmark … Ergo, the New Testament is no longer truth.

The whole culture is so “Christian” that no one within the culture needs to believe anything anymore, that the truth of Christianity need no longer be questioned (or affirmed) because the culture is thoroughly “Christian.” Even the Jews are Christian, Jierkegaard’s pseudonymous author remarks sarcastically. Of course, Kierkegaard is anticipating that this veil of hypocrisy (or unbelief) will inevitably be realized and exposed. What then? Kierkegaard aptly titles this section of the larger essay “A Eulogy upon the Human Race.”

Honest believers — he counts himself among them — will realize this contradiction, first as an individual crisis, but inevitably anticipating a larger social and cultural crisis. The center of this challenge is not only in the patterns of cultural change but within belief itself, so thinly dependent on narrative and interpretation.

This sense of acceptance on faith is challenged by the core of the Old Testament and its presentations. For example, Machiavelli took the Old Testament narrative of Moses slaying his own peoples (versus foreigners the slayings of whom were justified) as historically true and divinely sanctioned by ethics, written, thus incorporating this possible necessity for slaying one’s people in the options available to a Christian head of state. The critical reaction of modern politicians against this allowance by Machiavelli in The Prince is highly hypocritical. Does not every state, including the “Christian” one, tallow its princes who do not adhere to scriptural literalism anyway, to carry out murder against its citizens? Does it not at the same time profess that its violence is ethical? Though not mentioned by Kierkegaard, Machiavelli aptly if unintentionally fits the dilemma of Christian cultural identity.

But Kierkegaard focuses on a deeper ethical issue based not on scriptural interpretation but on an ethical dilemma presented by a core belief in the nature of God. In Fear and Trembling (1841), Kierkegaard recounts the biblical narrative of Abraham ordered by God to slay Isaac, Abraham’s only son and the only receptacle of the continuity of the faith which has been vouchsafed to Abraham. If ethics is universal, Kierkegaard argues, then the particular strives to conform to the universal. If ethics is particular it nevertheless has its telos, its end and fulfillment, in the universal. To say that the individual can suspend ethics, the universal, is a temptation, and to execute the temptation is a sin. Kierkegaard notes that the tragic hero of pagan culture who sacrificed a child to angry gods did so as a moral virtue but also as compliant obedience, an obeisance to fate. In the case of Abraham, however, he is expected by a personal God to accept his deed as the cost of maintaining faith and hope, though clearly contradicting the intrinsic ethics of the act, regardless of what hope Abraham may have of some subsequent miraculous turn, which is not a legitimate summoning of the individual versus the universal.

Given his beliefs, the tragic hero of paganism remains within the ethical, the telos, but in the same at Abraham does not. Abraham accepts the universal to be suspended for the particular, specifically for himself, transcending temptation and transforming it into ethical necessity,contradicting God’s will by either resisting temptation or by pursuing it. Abraham’s dilemma cannot be sustained.

“Therefore,” writes Kierkegaard, “though Abraham arouses my admiration, he at the same time appalls me.” Such is the painful paradox of faith, Kierkegaard admits. A tragic hero can still be consoled and counseled, but a “knight of faith” finds himself alone: “no one can give him counsel, him no one can understand.” Perhaps, he says, Hegel is “wrong in not protesting loudly and clearly against the fact that Abraham enjoys honor and glory as the father of faith, whereas he ought to be prosecuted and convicted of murder.”

Jorge Luis Borges notes (in his Norton Lectures) that in literature we respond not so much to plot and setting as character, specifically to the well-crafted and resonant moment when the character perceives the workings of fate and affirms destiny.

Thus, says Borges, at the moment of kissing Jesus, Judas Iscariot suddenly realized his destiny in betrayal. One may add, as a complementary point, that the historical Jesus recognizes his destiny in that moment on the cross when he cries out that God has forsaken him.

Fate is that lot which falls upon oneself, while destiny weaves the path or sequence toward that end, visible in retrospect. Fate in Greek mythology is cut out and assigned to each of us, as in a cloth pattern. Destiny provides amplitude for action, like the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell, wherein the outcome is understood while the given steps along the way may vary.

In literature and mythology, established parameters and conventions guide the characters to express the writer’s or the culture’s point of view. The individual is struck by events as cumulative destiny, not isolated and random but as shaped by the individual himself or herself: the decisions, the ethical interpretations, the responses of environment, the dreams and meaning crafted by the deepest self. Borges notes that the character of classic literature is esteemed over the centuries not for deeds or accomplishments or adventures, all matters of luck, circumstance and contrivance, but by the insight, recognition, and wisdom that the character comes to realize. We eventually may suspend belief in the events and adventures — be it in Homer, Shakespeare, or Cervantes’ Don Quixote — to remember only the character.

Writing of his time in the death camps of Nazi Germany, witnessing the suffering of his fellow prisoners, the psychotherapist Viktor Frankl noted that a person’s realization of fate challenged the very depths of psychological and spiritual resources. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails … gives him ample opportunity to add a deeper meaning to his life. He may remain brave, dignified, and unselfish, or … he may become no more than an animal. … This decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”

While we may speak of bravery and heroic virtue in the modern death camps, high expectations parallel to our expectations of figures in literature are perilous and close to unrealistic. As much as may wish to see heroism, as depicted in a Hollywood film, we would fail to understand the depths of suffering and its implication for civilization if we look too closely for heroes and not more broadly for the propelling cause or motive for the universalizing lessons about human nature.

As a psychologist himself, Frankl noted that one factor that perpetuated the torment of imprisonment is its indefinite status. Such a tool is employed by modern authoritarian powers in numerous situations east and west, where indefinite confinement, augmented by torture, underscores the meaninglessness of the prisoner’s life. It was not the confinement of a Prometheus but the vicariousness of suffering and the interminable nature of it that would lead to despair. Despair was the chief characteristic that Frankl observed in the prisoners around him.

Can anyone truly master their fate once it is revealed? In classical drama, the character’s coping is the true attraction of the literature, the reader or audience engaged in seeing not so much how the story unravels as to witness how the character resolves life’s dilemmas. The satisfactory resolution is called comedy, while the inability to overcome fate or the products of destiny is called tragedy. In each case, the stature of the character accentuates the resolution: a poor, simple person is best for comedy, the heroic character of great potential is best for tragedy.

The modern world has reversed the sociology of classic literature: the simple and downtrodden slip deeper into tragic circumstances, while the superficial and wealthy enjoy comedic outcomes within their frivolous concerns. Modern literature often takes classic plot models but fails to produce adequate characterization. Social and psychological circumstances have more import to our discerning criticism of literature and art today, so that we have now have tools for breaking down the pretenses of modern arts as mere epiphenomena of culture rather than as genuine understanding of wisdom and spiritual depth.

Ultimately, wisdom and spiritual depth cannot be portrayed in a fictional or even artistic or creative effort. Lurking about the artistic creation is still the subjective and contrived sense that the character is being made to go in a certain direction. As much as one appreciates the sage character of Gibran’s prophet or Hesse’s Siddhartha, we know that we are looking at cardboard cut-outs that substitute for whatever the real experience is behind the presentation.

Art has a necessary and inevitable function of substitution, of universalizing presentation, and in this virtue one may delight. But we must accept the invitation to the next step, to the step that takes us closer to a path, to a destiny, to self-realization. Our creative impulses can weave fictions, images, and music, but only in stillness and emptiness, even of these creative impulses, do we discover the depths of self, meaning, and destiny.

In his classic book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1st ed. 1947, 2nd ed. 1970), Joseph Campbell described the hero’s journey in world myths as a “monomyth” insofar as the mythic process, symbols, and paths are universal to world cultures and a foundational aspect of primitive and ancient civilizations and cultures.

The hero’s journey begins with the “call to adventure,” the struggle against obstacles and trials, the discovery of the treasure, and the return to share the boon. But across the globe, the myth with its different heroes, settings, thresholds, menaces, boons, and obstacles, reflects the human psyche, the deep plunge into the unconscious, the extracting of courage and fearlessness to pursue self-development, the many obstacles, puzzles, mazes, conundrums encountered, until the breakthrough of the personality into self-discovery and self-actualization.

The hermit is an important figure at the outset of the hero’s journey, represented in folklore and mythology as the wise encouraging guide, the dispenser of protection, counsel, and well-being. The hermit may be presented as the solitary wise one dwelling in a forest or cave, that is, the source of strength in the receded consciousness that represents stability and a reservoir of compassion and wisdom, stern but reassuring. Thus, as the adventure begins,

Whether dream or myth, in these adventures there is an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as a guide, marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography. …
The first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass …

The crone or fairy godmother in European fairy tales, the Virgin in Christianity, the African Mother of the Gods, the Native American Spider Woman, the Eastern Cosmic Mother, Dante’s Beatrice, Goethe’s Gretchen -— all manifest supernatural guidance, especially representative of the peace of Paradise and the cosmic womb. Masculine figures of aid and guidance are usually “some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith.” In higher mythologies, the masculine guide is the teacher, and especially the ferryman, such as Hermes or Thoth. [An accessible example, not mentioned by Campbell, is the character of the ferryman in Hesse’s novel Siddhartha.]

But things can go wrong. The individual can refuse the call, can turn away from self-development, can subordinate themselves to routines and forces around them in a stifled psychological morass. As anthropologist Ernst Becker noted (in his book The Birth and Death of Meaning, 2nd ed., 1970):

If you stay on the first or personal level for any length of time you may lead a way of life of an eccentric or a hermit, which few can do; even then it is doubtful whether they can do it without the symbols of allegiance or the solid memories of some of the higher levels [of psychological and spiritual consciousness] laid down in early years. The first level for man is unadulterated narcissism; it is pathological and it invites or is already mental illness.

Becker here clearly demarcates the recluse versus the historical hermit who has attained an ascent from personal to social to world-dwelling or secular to the sacred or spiritual level, what Becker identifies as the hierarchy of self-development, the “levels of power and meaning that an individual can choose to live by.”

Hence the common guidance by the experienced to the aspiring hermit: don’t do it if you are carrying emotional (or other) baggage. The true hermit is not one who has simply remained an a stage of infantile or child-like development or naivety, nor one who has failed at a social or secular stage and remained incapable of integrating the lessons and harm, simply one who fears or shuns the world and social contact. The true hermit must have transcended the stages and levels of self-development to confirm and assert a powerful spiritual purpose. Examples of unsuccessful, even moribund, recluses in this regard are occasionally well-documented, as in Raleigh Trevelyan’s “A Hermit Disclosed” or the contemporary Christopher Knight, the so-called “Maine hermit,” described in Michael Finkel’s biography Stranger in the Woods, who represents not a hermit but a pathological recluse. Note how popular culture erroneously, even fatally, conflates these pathological figures with “hermits.” On the contrary, these recluses represent what Campbell, echoed by Becker, points out as the refusal of the call, but, further, even lack the grace or character of the refusers found in the myths. As Campbell puts it:

The literature of psychoanalysis abounds in examples of such desperate fixations. What they represent is an impotence to put off the infantile ego, with its sphere of emotional relationships and ordeals. One is bound in by the wall of childhood; the father and mother stand as threshold guardians, and the timorous soul, fearful of some punishment, fails to make the passage through the door and come to birth in the world without.

Such is the fate of the weak refuser, creating of the self a victim to be saved. In fairy tales and myths these victims include Daphne, Brunhild, Briar-rose (Sleeping Beauty), Lot’s wife, the Wandering Jew, and Prince Kamar (of the Arabian Nights).

But, as Campbell puts it:

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required. So it is that sometimes the predicament following obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the occasion of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release.

And here, precisely, will be found the historical hermits, though Campbell footnotes Otto Rank’s preferred figure of the productive artist as this model. Artist or hermit-poet, hermit-meditator, etc., the figure now transcends even the run-a-day social figure and becomes a new category of hero. Campbell elaborates on the mental process.

Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of the spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. This is a basic principle of Indian disciplines of yoga. It has been the way, also, of many creative spirits in the West. It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved.

Thus the hermit reaches to embrace the capacity of the sage, not as mere world-denier but as aspirant to transcendence and the genius of a self-expression in accord with the hermit’s own tradition, a transcendence that is structured within a psychological balance, utilizing the gifts of art, insight, and compatibility.